International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and…

This paper falls into three parts: a description of the current French educational system and the groups influencing it; presentation of the more pressing educational problems of the 1980s; and a draft of developmental modifications likely to occur if liberals or, alternatively, socialists win political power in the early 1980s. (Author/SJL)

Draws on Weber to argue that clear and persistent differences between French and English primary education arise from deeply embedded cultural traditions through which fundamental value orientations are mediated and that these contrasting value orientations represent secularized educational versions of French Catholicism and English Protestantism.…